#monism — Public Fediverse posts

A Story of the Case

Introduction

Hello, I’m Roberta Dawn Ezell; but, my friends call me Dawn.
I have cancer and may die.
I haven’t given up, but I have considered my mortality.
In this consideration, I have decided I want to share my understanding of the case, such as it is.
I hope my report on the case in some way helps you develop your understanding of the case.

What is the Case?

Things are as they are.
I call things as they are: the case.
The case is things as they are.

Whatever is, however it is, is the case.

• It is the case that I think.
• It is the case that wood floats on water.
• It is the case that humans have walked on the Moon.
• It is the case that one plus two equals three.
• It is the case that bishops move only diagonally in chess.
• It is the case that sunlight harms vampires in many stories.

The case is whatever is, however it is.
When a story reports the case, I call the story true.
The case is what true stories report.

What is Not the Case?

The case is things as they are.
A thing that is not, is not a thing.

The case is whatever is, however it is.
A thing that is other than it is, is a contradiction, so can not be.

The case is what true stories report.
There is not anything that literally is not the case.

We may call stories that do not report the case: not the case.
We do so figuratively.
We do not mean to say that the story itself is not the case.
The story, and whether or not it reports the case, is the case.

Nor do stories that do not report the case provide evidence of anything that is not the case.
Our possible subjects for stories have never been confined to things that exist beyond their stories.

What is not the case?
There is not anything that is not the case.

The case is not and has no peer.
The case is not and has no divider.
There doesn’t exist anything to separate the the case as space separates the stars.
The case is not and has no before, after, above, below, inside, outside, or in any other way a beyond.
The case is not broken up into units or parts, nor does it have any possibility for defect. There does not exist anything to thin the case as water thins wine, for instance.
The case is not changing. The case was not, is not, and can not be in any way other than it is.
The case is not moving. The case has nowhere from which or to which to go.
If it did, then it is already there, and can not move there anyway.

Or, to sum up these old arguments:
For a thing to relate, there must exist something other than the thing with which the thing can relate.
For the case to relate, there must exist something other than the case with which the case could relate.
There does not exist anything other than the case with which the case could relate.
The case can not relate.

The Case is Not Relative

Some have said of the case that is is describable only by what it is not.
While I disagree, I can appreciate the sentiment.

The case can not be any relative thing.
If a thing must relate with another thing to be what it is, then the case can not be that thing.
The case can not be a parent, child, producer, product, cause, effect, means, end, part, composition, substance, body, container, content, member, class, inside, outside, before, after, beyond, or any other relative thing.

What is the Case?

• The case is peerless.
• The case is one in quantity.
• The case is total, without anything in any way beyond it.
• The case is continuous/fully dense/without segments, gaps, or defect.
• The case is absolute, without variation or change, always the same.

The case seems… boring.
How can such a boring seeming case be the same case where I may die of cancer?

Well, something happens when you consider the shape of the case, specifically its size.

What is the Form of the Case?

Classically, there have been several attempts to answer this question.
The solution of Parmenides was on the right track, but Parmenides suffered from 6th century Mediterranean math.
The solution of Melissus was logically consistent, but boring.
The most successful solution was the the atomic theory of Leucippus and Democritus.

I noticed what I believe to be an error.
I won’t dwell on the error.
Read John Burnett’s, “Ancient Greek Philosophy” if you want more on that.
Here, I simply seek to show the corrected solution.

All the solutions of the form of the case are basically the same, save for the size of the shape.

The case could be zero, finite, or infinite extent.

The case can not be finite extent, as a finite extent would require a beyond to be beyond its limits or through which the finite extent could loop.

The case could be zero, or infinite extent.

If the case were zero extent:
It never was, and never shall be, for it is all here and all now a continuous one!
I believe this would have been the solution of Parmenides of Elea had he known more math.
The case would be like a geometric point, with zero extent with any dimension; but, there would not be anything else but the point.

I think the mathematicians might call that a singularity.

In any case, I believe this shape to be consistent with the case and its lack of relativity.

It still seems boring.

If the case were infinite extent:

It ever was, and ever shall be, for it is everywhere and every-when the same without end!
This was the solution of Melissus of Samos.
The case would be like a flat Euclidean spacetime.

In any case, I believe this shape to be consistent with the case and its lack of relativity.

It still seems boring.

The case cold be zero, or infinite extent.

The atomists decided both the solution of Parmenides and Melissus were correct, and used those different solutions to relate with each other. Here, we basically do the same thing, but with a corrected solution of Parmenides.

We found no reason reject either option on grounds of logical consistency.

However, each option seems boring.

This leaves us one more possibility.

Perhaps we are dealing with an inclusive or operator here.
What is the case were zero and infinite in extent.
As far as my knowledge permits, I do not think geometry has an issue with this.

Everyone is familiar with shapes like the cone.
On one end, you have the base: a circle.
On the other end you have a tip: a point.
Betwixt the two ends, you have the cylinder itself.
One can imagine the case as something like a cylinder, with an infinite base.

We can have the infinite space.
We can have the point.
We can have them both as ends of the same shape.
We are somewhere between those extremes.

Imagine a point within an infinite spacetime.
Can you move the point relative to the spacetime.
It starts an infinite distance from the ends of the spacetime.
It ends an infinite distance from the ends of the spacetime.
From start to end, every position was an infinite distance from the ends of spacetime.
The same still holds for changes in orientation and scale as well.
Motion relative to an infinite expanse is not possible.

There is one relation that works remarkably well: division.
You can take as many points as you like from a point without diminishing the point.
Zero from zero equals zero.
Imagine dividing the point into many points through spacetime.
With spacetime dividing the point like space divides the stars, the points may now relate with each other.
The points can relate positions, orientations, scales.
We have the ingredients of a simple geometry and can use them to describe a lot.

This brings our little model as close to the ancient atomic theory as it gets.
I mention this to help ground our model.

We have an infinite spacetime populated with many points of zero size.
Conceptually, we can take any number of points from any point without diminishing any point.
We may also combine any number of points together into a single point without producing a bigger point.
Conceptually, we can arrange these points to produce all sorts of interesting constellations.

The ancient atomic theory suffered a major flaw:

Why?
Why would its atoms have different shapes?
Why would they cling together or repel or move as the philosophers said they did.
Currently, our model suffers that same flaw.

Fear not, for there is an answer.
Better yet, there is a question.

If the point always is, and the point has zero duration, wouldn’t it seem to fall out of a spacetime with infinite duration in an instant?

That is not permitted to happen.

The point always is, and the spacetime always is.

This is so despite their massive difference in size. (I so want to torture that to reference HGTTG)

How can something with zero duration persist throughout infinite duration?

This our why.

I’ll discuss that later.
We have gotten diverted, and for good cause.

If the case is zero and infinite extent, then it does not seem boring at all!

Conclusion

The case is whatever is, however it is.
There is not anything else.
The case can not relate.
The case can have a form or shape so long as it is consistent with the case.
The case can consistently be both zero and infinite, but the case is one in quantity, so the case must be both in a single unified shape.
I’ll discuss that shape and how it works next time if I can.

Afterword

I do apologize for how rushed all this is.
My life was not one that afforded me the luxury to ponder such things.
I pondered them anyway.
Now that I see death on the horizon, even if I can not tell how far that horizon is, I want to share what little I figured out.

I started a new round of chemo yesterday.
So far I’m tolerating it well.
I miss being able to take long walks.
I’m going to go see if my sister wants to go out for some little walks.

🧠 Is human #consciousness a magical #mystery—or simply a hard-hitting success story of #evolution? 🧬

In this new #podcast, we put on our evolutionary glasses and take a closer look at #materialisticmonism!

👉 https://open.spotify.com/episode/2BfpZKFyHwl4LEkTMVme8w?si=RptWM_aMQFq2THiK7k632A

#Monism #Materialism #Philosophy #Dualism #MindAndBrain #ChristianBührig #Evolution #Neuroscience #PredictiveProcessing #Dreams #FreeWill #ArtificialConsciousness #PhilosophyPodcast #KnowledgePodcast

Brian Greene in conversation with David Deutsch.
What Is Quantum Mechanics Really Telling Us? | World Science Festival
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Af5LICjFIBc
#science #quantummechanics #freewill #monism

Ditching Dualism #6: Maybe Monism?

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.resilience.org/stories/2025-12-31/ditching-dualism-6-maybe-monism/

The Architecture of Resistance

The seventeenth-century Hague, the mid-twentieth-century Levant, and the digital terraforming of 2025 have a shared preoccupation with the “Average.” Whether it is the theologian’s way or predictive stats, control begins by smoothing out the landscape. The project of power is a project of cartography and illumination—an attempt to banish the dark corners where the unmapped might grow. Thus, the history of resistance, of being “against the world”, is less a history of rebellion than a history of seeking cover.

In Spinoza’a world, legibility was the cosmos in an ordered hierarchy. Meaning descended from an external judge and was mirrored by the terrestrial proxy of the King and more often the priest. Behavior was aligned to the “Scriptural Average.” A pre-written behavioral code that transformed the conatus—that primal drive to persist and expand—into the passive states of hope and fear. By removing the external judge, Spinoza suggested that freedom is found in the intellectual mastery of the causes that move us. A pushback against the “average pious subject,” asserting that every individual is a necessary, logical expression of an infinite substance. There is no error in the world, only the lack of a thick enough understanding to perceive the necessity of one’s own outlier status. 

With this position, and self assurance, Spinoza became illegible to his friends, his doting teacher, and his community. He was cast out, but his thoughts are the seeds of today’s world. 

In the Beirut and Damascus of the mid-twentieth century, the imposition of legibility took the form of the “Citizen-as-Monument.” It was a world of endings, where identity was a frozen artifact of nationalist scripts and religious orthodoxies. The poet Adonis, through Mihyar, pushes against this world not by asserting a new identity, but through a “movement of erasure.” If a stable interior is to form, it is to be quickly discarded. A stable interior is merely another coordinate, a dependable predictor, for the state to map. Mihyar becomes a “knight of strange words,” defined by the iltifat—the sudden turn away. By peeling back the layers of the social mask and embracing a radical anonymity, he counters the stagnant city. He exists as a hot wind, something that is felt through its movement and friction, yet remains entirely unsearchable by the collective grammar.

We have entered a third world, a digital landscape that functions as a terraformed plain. It is, in a sense, a Spinozan monism—all data is one substance—but it is a substance managed by a Leibnizian bureaucracy of optimization. The mechanism of control is no longer the scripture or the state monument, but the “Mechanical Harmony” of the statistical mean. A decade ago this was social media shaping votes. Today’s AI tools, perhaps inadvertently and perhaps not,  impose an “averageness” on thought itself, by providing the next likely response and hiding the outlier. This is a form of disindividuation disguised as efficiency, a smoothing of the world’s texture until it becomes a frictionless surface for the sake of searchability.

What emerges as a necessary response is the logic of the thicket. If the terraformed plain is the habitat of the tourist—where everything is predicted, optimized, and known—the thicket is the habitat of the explorer. It is a deliberate architecture of complexity, an insistence on terroir and the messy, non-replicable context of the local. To build a thicket is to re-introduce friction into a world too smooth. We are apes inhabiting the long tail. Like Spinoza, our conatus withers under the umbrella the statistical mean. If every response is predicted, the individual ceases to be a cause and becomes merely a consequence of the architecture.

To emerge, life itself needed discontinuities. The thicket provides the opacity necessary for the transforming process of the self to occur. It honors the uneven distribution of the world, providing a high-density environment of unique, complex encounters impossible in a flat plain. In this 2025 context, to be “against the world” is perhaps better understood as being a cultivator of these unsearchable spaces. The Dark Forest of the internet has created literal operating systems, habitats for our interconnected selves. Away from the violent imposition of the center, things can still happen by surprise. We seek cover in the thicket as a primal way of being where the emergent world remains deep enough to inhabit.

#Adonis #AI #AlgorithmicFlattening #AliAhmadSaidEsber #ArchitectureOfResistance #artificialIntelligence #Conatus #CulturalCritique #DigitalTerraforming #history #Iltifat #IntellectualHistory #LLMs #LogicOfTheThicket #MechanicalHarmony #MihyarTheDamascene #Monism #Noodiversity #OntologicalResistance #philosophy #philosophyOfTechnology #RadicalImmanence #Spinoza #StatisticalAverage #TheThicket #writing

https://youtu.be/EgGfQdv_rPc

#agriculture #animism #apocrypha #astrology #bible #collectivism #civilization #christianity #culture #cosmology #cosmos #earthmother #esotericism #individualism #judaism #knowledge #materialism #monism #monotheism #motherearth #mothergoddess #nephilim #neuroscience #neuropsychology #pantheism #philosophy #poetry #polytheism #psychology #religion #secretsociety #spiritualism #spirituality #symbolism #theism #theology #society

(2/6)

https://youtu.be/9MURGjjG4aA

#astronomy #biology #consciousness #cosmology #cosmos #evolution #information #materialism #metaphysics #monism #neuropsychology #neuroscience #perception #philosophy #physicalism #physics #physiology #politics #psychology #quantum #reality #religion #secretsociety #science #society #socialsciences #spiritualism #technology #transhumanism #theism #theology #universe

(1/6)

Det stod "fjärrstyrda", men jag ändrade till "hjärnstyrda".

Undrar vad Mats, filosofen på Konsthallstorget tycker om det.
#filosofi #monism

#Zoomposium with Professor Dr. #Daniel #Dennett: “A #naturalistic #view on #consciousness”

The #philosophical #concept of supposed #naturalistic #monism is currently the basis of most approaches to elucidating the phenomenon of #consciousness in the research field of #cognitive #neuroscience, which attempt to #reduce #mental states to #physical #states.

More at: https://philosophies.de/index.php/2023/12/25/naturalistic-view/

or: https://youtu.be/M2qiVz95ZYk

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE-Il1aIEOr/?igsh=emM3OHk0NzR5d3Fu What if death is not the end? For Spinoza’s #monism, the universe is one infinite, eternal substance, and we are its temporary modes—fleeting waves in an #ocean of being. Our minds and bodies will dissolve, but the substance endures, transforming. From the perspective of #eternity, distinctions like self and other, life and death, are illusions.We are moments of the infinite, inseparable from the whole, destined to return to it. #philosophy #psychology #science #nature

A look through the #materialistic #monism glasses

Anyone who always sees things through their own glasses (doesn't even have to be “pink”) will at some point lose sight of the big picture with all its facets. Or to put it in a more modern culturally technical way: Anyone who is always sitting in their “#filter #bubble" or “#echo #chamber" need not be surprised if at some point they have their own feedback loops in a parallel world of “#digital #tribalism"

More at: https://philosophies.de/index.php/2021/07/31/ein-blick-durch-die-materialistische-monismus-brille/

#MichaelRuse - #Philosophy of #Reductionism & #Emergence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S39nn-lKAtw

#PhilosophyOfScience #Science #Hierarchy #Hierarchies #Physics #Biology #WeakEmergence #StrongEmergence #MindBodyProblem #PhilosophyOfBiology #PhilosophyOfConsciousness #Consciousness #Panpsychism #Monism #Dualism #PhilosophyOfMind #Mind #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn

#RichardSwinburne - Arguments for #Atheism?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYbibaV4AXU

#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #Science #PhilosophyOfReligion #Religion #God #Afterlife #Death #Life #Soul #Dualism #Monism #Agnostic #Agnosticism #Atheist #Theist #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn

#SwamiMedhananda - #Metaphysics: #Essence and #Existence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YQ3h9zU-pI

#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfConsciousness #Consciousness #PhilosophyOfMind #Mind #Religion #God #Life #Meaning #Soul #Spirit #Dualism #Monism #NonDualism #Causality #Buddhism #Hinduism #Space #Time #Vedanta #ClosertoTruth #RobertKuhn

#EricSchwitzgebel - What is the #MindBodyProblem?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UanDuyeatE0

#Philosophy #PhilosophOfMind #Mind #PhilosophyOfConsciousness #Consciousness #PhilosophyOfScience #Science #Brain #Body #Dualism #Monism #Belief #Intentionality #Experience #Awareness #Qualia #Idealism #Materialism #Physicalism #CommonSense #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn

#MassimoPigliucci - #LifeAfterDeath: #Virtual #Immortality

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsDo1j3D-4I

#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfScience #Science #PhilosophyOfBiology #Biology #PhilosophyOfConsciousness #Consciousness #Human #Humanity #Lifespan Dualism #Monism #Ghost #Spirit #Soul #God #Religion #Theism #Theology #Uploading #Mind #TechnoOptimism #Simulation #Cloning #StarTrek #Transporter #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn

@Radical_EgoCom @tstrike78
This is where dualists (and mentalists) such as #Penrose provide a different view.

AIUI they have Mind as being able to alter the probability of neurons firing.

#Dualism #Monism #Gradualism #Sciencism

#MichaelShermer - Is #Consciousness #Irreducible?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj6-iA3T7PM

#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind #Mind #PhilosophyOfConsciousness #Brain #Brains #LawsOfNature #LawsOfPhysics #Dualism #Monism #Metaphysics #Language #Forces #ForcesOfNature #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn

#DavidChalmers - What #Exists?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6FodXTwB04

#Philosophhy #Metaphysics #Existence #Things #Objects #Being #LawsOfNature #LawsOfPhysics #Physics #Science #PhilosophyOfScience #Metaphysician #Matter #Energy #SpaceTime #Universe #Physicalism #Physicalist #Consciousness #Mind #Panpsychism #Monism #Dualism #Contingency #Idealism #AbstractObjects #Aggregation #CloserToTruth #RobertKhun

För fyra år sedan skyltade Filosofen på Konsthallstorget med detta påstående.
#monism #filosofen #Konsthallstorget

#GregBoyd - What Would an #Immortal #Soul Be Like?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa6KfI1K4mE

#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfReligion #Religion #God #Metaphysics #Immortality #ImmortalSoul #Resurrection #Spirit #Spirituality #Physicalism #Materialism #Dualism #Death #Heaven #Forever #Evangelical #Monism #Neuroscience #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn

#TimBayne - Is #Consciousness Unified?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT2LXEYzPHs&ab_channel=CloserToTruth

#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind #Mind #PhilosophyOfConsciousness #Neurophysiology #Neuroscience #Brain #Experience #Subjectivity #Dualism #Monism #Soul #CoConsciousness #Hypnosis #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn